All posts for the month June, 2014

I’ve had my Xtracycle for a few months now and have found it very handy for a lot of purposes: Shopping, taking my wife and our dogs for a Sunday ride, E-recyclables to E-Waste, etc. I’ve read on other blogs about other owners finding things along the road. Furniture, knickknacks, etc., but that hasn’t happened with me. At least, not yet…

Last night, I went on my weekly pizza run Papa John’s with my pizza warming system ready. I wrote about this recently here. While on the way, I saw one of my coworkers from work walking down the street. To protect her identity, We’ll call her Lily L.

Anyway, I don’t usually see her walking in this area, thought nothing of it, waved hi to her. I was about to ride on when she looked up, recognized me and said, “Ty! Ty!” and seemed a bit distressed. I pulled my bike on over and she said she had parked her car near the train station that morning, but couldn’t find it now. She asked me if I could look for it for her. I pointed to the rear deck of my bike and showed her the foot rests and stoker bar (passenger handlebars, which you can see below if you look closely,

and said “You can hop on and come with me.” She looked at it and said ok and got on. I checked to make sure she was ready and off we went

Lily looked for her car, and then within a minute exclaimed “Oh my gosh! I parked at the other train station in Belmont! My car is nowhere near here!” I told her no problem as Belmont was only two miles away. We set off down the road.

Lily thanked me profusely as she would have had to call a cab otherwise, as nobody was home to pick her up. She seemed to really enjoy the ride and kept commenting on how fun it was and kept asking if I was ok, as I was doing all the work. I said no problem as it was good training for me and her light weight was no burden at all.

So I decided one of the things I wanted to do once I got the Xtracycle set up was to go get my own pizza on the bike. I could have done it with the CETMA five rail rack on the front, but it would have been more awkward.

The main issue with going to get your own pizza is coming back with it warm. I don’t mind cold pizza the next day, but hate it when I first get it from the pizza place. So first step was to get my own pizza bag. I did extensive research on the subject – basically went to Amazon and spent five minutes looking at reviews, and got this one.

Next step was going into the realm of invention. I knew the bag would keep it warm, but I wanted it go come home piping hot. What to do? I got the idea to get a warming pack from a pet bed we have. It has a heavy round plastic insert that is microwaved and radiates heat for a couple of hours. I wanted to get one that fits well in a pizza box, so found this one

that is designed for people who take casseroles to pot luck, church social., etc

Then I got a medium-sized pizza box from the good folks at my local Papa John’s and crudely put a bunch of venting holes on top.

It is the right size for the warming pack. It won’t move around too much. The warming pack assembly goes in the pizza bag, and the fresh pizza goes on top. Heat rises and all that…

Since the pizza bag is soft, I kept a couple of large pizza boxes from the last run to give it some stability. I put those on top of the warming pack, put it in the pizza bag, cargo netted the whole thing to the deck of my Free Radical, ordered two pizzas (buy one, get one free night) and off I rode the two miles to Papa Johns.

The Pizza guy did a double-take when he saw my pizza bag and was quite impressed by it. “I can ‘t believe no one else thinks of this!” he said. He was also impressed by my improvised warming technology.

I put the fresh pizza in the bag and headed home. FYI – temps were in the low 50’s. When I got home and pulled out the first piece I was immediately rewarded with piping hot pizza! The wife, who usually rolls her eyes at my ideas had to admit this was a good one. We kept the pizza in the warming bag and took slices out as we needed them. The best part was the pizza stayed hot until we finally put the leftovers in the fridge. The only down side is that I ate almost twice as much pizza as usual. My excuse was the pipinghotedness of it was hard to resist and I did ride to go get it!!

In any case, if you like pizza, I highly recommend you adopt my method. Even if you go by car <shudder> it still is nice to have it stay hot all night.